Down Among the Women (22 page)

‘Ill? You are a stupid, impotent, elderly old dribbler,’ Scarlet shrieks. ‘All you’ve ever been good for is to pay the bills. Skinny-Winny!’

Edwin slams on the brakes. Scarlet allows herself to fall forward and bangs her head badly. Byzantia starts to cry.

‘Now we know,’ says Edwin, above the noise. ‘Now we know your true motives. I always suspected it. Well, now we know. Prostitute!’

‘Prostitute—’ she laughs, holding her head, where a lump is already beginning.

‘Whore,’ he hisses. ‘Slut. Sex-mad animal. Thank God my mother never lived to see me tied to a foul creature like you.’

Scarlet decides it is madness to be sitting in a stalled car with other cars hooting all around, with an insane, elderly school inspector. She tries to get out. He tries to stop her.

‘If you go,’ he says, ‘not another penny, not another penny.’

‘Mum—’ says Byzantia from the back.

Scarlet heaves herself over into the back seat and clasps Byzantia.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says to her daughter, ‘sorry. Really it’s all right. It’s going to be all right. It will never happen again—’

The car jerks forward.

‘Quieter now, are you?’ asks Edwin.

‘Yes,’ says Scarlet, with apparent docility.

‘That man should give you shock treatment,’ says Edwin. ‘It’s what you need.’

At the next red traffic light Scarlet opens the door and shuffles herself and Byzantia out of the car. Edwin shakes his fist and holds up Scarlet’s handbag, which she has left behind, and drives off in triumph. They are twenty miles from home. Scarlet smiles. She has a ten-shilling note in her pocket; otherwise she would not have abandoned her handbag.

A car pulls up beside them. It is a dirty Jaguar.

‘Can I help you?’ asks the driver. He is quite young, and has good white teeth, which he is now showing, for he is smiling broadly. Scarlet feels she is unused to seeing men smile.

‘No, thank you,’ says Scarlet, with a feeling of discovery. ‘I can look after myself perfectly well.’

It is a useful discovery, because the following day she receives a letter from Edwin’s solicitors saying she will receive no more maintenance. He rings in the evening to see if she is prepared to be reasonable about Edwina’s name, but Scarlet is not.

‘In that case,’ says Edwin, ‘that is that. You are a wicked woman. You have ruined my life, and you mean to ruin your child’s. What will you do, go out cleaning again?’

‘No.’

‘No, perhaps not. You are not very good at it, are you? The house is much cleaner now you have left. There are vacancies for porters on London Underground. You should consider it. It might suit you. You can put Edwina in a home, I suppose, amongst strangers. I am starting divorce proceedings, for your information.’

‘So am I.’

‘What?’

‘I am proceeding against you for mental cruelty.’

He puts the telephone down abruptly, and comes straight round. His eyes are red from weeping.

‘I was never cruel to you,’ he says, ‘never. I was always kind. I loved you and Byzantia. If I have offended you please forgive me. I will try and do better. I would cut off my right arm to please you.’

‘No,’ says Scarlet, who is tired. ‘You were never cruel to me. I was only joking.’

‘Not a very funny joke,’ he says, recovering quickly enough at the slightest sign of weakness from Scarlet. He has brought her handbag back.

‘How did you get home?’ he enquires.

‘A man in a dirty Jaguar picked me up,’ says Scarlet. ‘He is a rather eccentric solicitor, and a very kind man.’

‘He put you up to divorcing me for cruelty, didn’t he? After all I did for you and Byzantia. Rescuing you both from the gutter. Admit it.’

‘No.’

‘Yes, he did.’ Edwin begins to cry. ‘Everyone’s ganging up on me. All I ever do is try to be kind.’

Scarlet picks up the poker.

‘If you don’t go away I’ll kill you,’ she says.

He goes, passing the solicitor who is on the way in. The solicitor’s name is Alec. Scarlet has heard the gate click, and knows Alec is on his way. Now she has, as it were, the law on her side, she is prepared to murder Edwin. She certainly wants to. She can bear depending on Edwin, hating Edwin, despising Edwin, but she cannot endure being sorry for him.

Edwin never returns. Scarlet receives divorce papers from him through the post, and does not argue; a private detective comes to examine the double bed she shares with Alec, but she never actually sees Edwin again.

Sometimes he moves through her dreams, grey, thin and fidgety, making her feel bad.

There is a sale of Y’s paintings. They fetch a record price. Y is dead. There will be no more paintings. The art columns of the Sunday papers tremble with loss and grief. The greatest painter of a generation. Perhaps the only real female painter who ever was, hounded to death, destroyed by her own hand. Helen takes the blame. X is exonerated. His own pictures go up in value. He is popular again within six months.

Picture the scene one evening, when Carl and Helen still lived together, when Y still lived. Carl arrives home early, champagne under each arm, to celebrate a successful sale.

As he turns on the light in the living-room, there is a scuffling on the floor. It is Helen, his mistress, and X, once his most promising young painter. He turns off the light and goes away.

‘He must have seen,’ says Helen, appalled.

‘Do him good,’ says X.

‘He’ll murder me,’ says Helen.

‘You’re a big girl,’ says X. ‘Murder him back. I’ll look after you.’

‘Supposing he tells Y?’

‘He won’t dare. Y does as I tell her. If there’s trouble he’ll get no more of her paintings.’

Helen struggles to get to her feet, but X pins her down and forces her legs apart. She giggles, pleased by thoughts of rape, relieved of guilt by the knowledge that she is helpless.

An hour later they are both still there on the floor, entwined, when Carl comes in with Y.

(‘Sex drives you mad,’ says Helen to Jocelyn, months later. ‘We must have known what would happen. If he’d gone when Carl first came back Y might be alive now. Perhaps we just wanted to hurt her. Perhaps all X has ever done is want to hurt Y. Even now she’s dead he gets at her, through me.’

‘What do you mean?’ Jocelyn is puzzled. They are both pregnant. Jocelyn eight months, Helen six. But all Helen can say is—‘By loving me.’)

Y is silent, and stands like a pale doll in the doorway, limbs limp, staring. Carl flies at Helen and strips her remaining clothes from her. She stands naked.

‘That’s how you came to me,’ he says. ‘That’s how you can go.’

X laughs. ‘What a foreigner you are, Carl,’ he says.

‘What do you mean?’ asks Carl, alarmed even in this extremity of situation by the suggestion that he is not behaving like a true Englishman.

‘You take sex so seriously,’ says X, adjusting his clothing. He turns to Y. ‘What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue? I am sorry this malicious pig has seen fit to bring you here.’

‘He is not a pig,’ says Y. ‘He is a friend. I think he is the only friend I have ever had.’

‘I am your friend,’ whispers poor naked Helen, but Y does not seem to hear.

‘Get out,’ says Carl to Helen. ‘Leave me alone. You are a dispensable and interchangeable woman. You are not even ornamental. Look at you, with your great orange nipples. You are coarse. I like a woman with little pink nipples.’

‘Yes. Get out,’ says Y. ‘I do not want you in the same room as my paintings. You defile them.’

This remark irritates X. It is as if she rated her paintings higher than she did him.

‘If she goes,’ he says, surprisingly, ‘I go with her, nipples and all.’

Carl and Y are taken aback. Y begins, at last, to cry; a gentle subdued painful sound. X steps forward and takes Y’s coat off. She lets her arms be moved, never helping or hindering, but does not stop sobbing. X puts the coat on Helen, who is more positively co-operative, and then puts his arm round her to offer yet more protection, and they leave.

‘I’ve had enough,’ X says, ‘of all this hysteria. I just want to live in some kind of peace.’ He adds, speaking to Carl, ‘I blame you for this. It need not have happened. You ridiculous foreigner, your taste is lousy. You are the con-man of the art world and I’ll see that everyone knows it.’

Helen and X go and live in the country. Helen gives out that she is pregnant: she sends flowers to Y one day, asking for forgiveness and a renewal of friendship, and offering to look after her children so Y can get on with her painting.

Since X left Y has felt paralysed. If she tries to paint she falls asleep. She has been sleeping with Carl but it does no good. Y plaits Helen’s flowers into a wreath and pins the letter above the gas-stove, and turns it on, and dies, as she has always known she would. She is thirty-five, and feels that life has been going on for a long, long time.

Helen receives anonymous and non-anonymous letters, blaming her for Y’s death. X is distraught. ‘You came into our lives,’ he says to Helen, ‘and destroyed them. Now you have killed my wife.’ For weeks he is silent, but he does not leave Helen. Nor does he ask her to marry him. ‘Y is my wife,’ he says. ‘You are my destiny. I was born under a fearful star.’ Art-conscious local people ask him round to dinners and parties. Helen is not asked. X goes. Helen, swelling and helpless, stays at home and waits, as Y once did.

Helen embroiders white linen cloths. She thinks, in her fantasies, she should have been some diplomat’s wife. She could have lived elegantly, in some European capital, and been gracious to important people. She thinks that would suit her. But she knows in her heart that nothing she ever does now will make any difference. Wherever she goes, Y will pad softly along behind, dressed in a white suit, pale and slightly stooping. X writes a monograph about Y’s work.

Helen rings Jocelyn once, but Jocelyn pretends to be out. Since Y died, Jocelyn thinks Helen is too wicked to be endured. She is grateful yet again for the enduring boredom of her own marriage.

Helen rings Sylvia, but Sylvia has left home. Butch now lives in their little house with a girl called Rachel. It was Sylvia who first met Rachel in the ante-natal clinic, where the latter was doing research, and brought her home, a plain, stark girl with up-swept horn-rimmed spectacles, a plump figure, hair unfashionably back-combed into a beehive, and a braying laugh. It does not occur to Sylvia that Butch will find Rachel attractive: that her own pale languor now bores, rather than appeals. During this last but successful pregnancy both her hearing and her eyesight have become worse, and she sometimes peers at Butch as if she could not remember who he was.

Rachel has no such handicap. She looks at hearty, healthy Butch with bright brown alert eyes and challenges his interest, and laughs uproariously when he makes dirty jokes. Sylvia, at such times, just looks bewildered and lady-like, and asks him to say it again. He can’t stand it.

On the day Butch’s divorce finally comes through he confides in Sylvia that he has been having an affair with Rachel for some months and that he wants to marry her. Sylvia asks Butch to repeat what he said. He hits her hard on the side of the head—the left side, the side of her best ear. Her ear whistles for days, and when it stops, it is because she can hear nothing.

Sylvia, after a lonely day or two, goes to stay with Jocelyn. When she is gone, Rachel—who has been keeping an eye on the house—moves into it with Butch. So far as Rachel is concerned, Sylvia has been making Butch unhappy, and so deserves whatever she gets.

Butch and Rachel live happily ever afterwards.

As for Helen, she types X’s monograph on Y, and waits for her child to be born. X says it is Carl’s child. She knows that it is not.

D
OWN AMONG THE WOMEN.

Miss Rogers is a nice person. She helps at the Old People’s Home. She is forty-five and has never married. She walks home across the park, and sometimes joins me on my bench.

‘It’s not men’s fault,’ she says to me, quite out of the blue one day.

‘What isn’t?’ I ask.

‘Women,’ she says. ‘I used to blame men for women’s condition, not now. In the end men are irrelevant. Women are happy or unhappy, fulfilled or unfulfilled, and it has nothing to do with men.’ She sighs. She is a handsome, large woman: she wears a bold red coat. I wonder why she has never married. ‘A forty-year-old man has no trouble going off with a twenty-year-old girl,’ she says, as if I had spoken aloud, ‘but who is going to go off with me?’

‘You never know,’ I say.

‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s too late for me. And don’t think I don’t regret it, because I do.’

And instead of throwing a pellet of bread in front of a pigeon, she throws it at the unfortunate bird, so it rises into the air with fright.

‘I would have liked to have made some man happy,’ she says.

‘What?’ I ask, trying to cheer her up. ‘Cook and clean for someone just as able-bodied as you?’ She is such a bold dark clever-looking woman her softness surprises me.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘That’s the whole trouble. One likes to serve.’

And off she goes, carrying her basket of goodies to her old people, an aged Red Riding Hood with no wolf pursuing.

Susan goes to visit Wanda. She wears a little hat. She must be the only young woman left in London to do so. Wanda is packing. She is moving yet again. Her new flat will cost ten shillings a week more but there are fewer stairs to climb. Wanda’s legs are beginning to feel their age.

Susan is surprisingly practical about the green and yellow lino. She levers it up, ignoring the dirt and grime beneath it, and stacks it in piles.

‘Scarlet used to do that for me,’ says Wanda. ‘But of course she’s too busy now.’

‘What at?’ asks Susan.

‘Being kept,’ says Wanda sourly. ‘That girl has the soul of a prostitute.’

‘I’m kept too,’ says Susan. ‘I don’t work or anything.’

‘Yes, but you pay for it,’ says Wanda, who is almost fond of Susan. ‘You’re married.’ If Wanda has too much to drink she will lurch over to Susan and embrace her. And too much drink, for Wanda these days, is anything to drink at all.

Susan laughs nervously. She is at a loss to explain her liking for Wanda. She does not tell Kim she visits his former wife—but then she cannot tell Kim much at all, for he is seldom at home.